Trenton Doyle Hancock: Unclassifiable

Trenton Doyle Hancock:Unclassifiable Karen Wilkin (bio) and Trenton Doyle Hancock (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Trenton Doyle Hancock. Trenton Doyle Hancock Presents The Moundverse, Chapter 2: Veganism (2020). Pages 13 & 14 from suite of 19 framed drawings, ink on paper. Each page: 24 × 36 inches. Photo by Phoebe d'Heurle. © 2024 Trenton Doyle Hancock. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan, New York [End Page 67] How to describe Trenton Doyle Hancock? He is a superb draftsman, painter, muralist, and installation artist who has used everything from pen and ink to tapestry to make overscaled drawings, confrontational canvases incorporating aggressive collage elements, graphic novels and illustrated narratives, enterable structures, ballet sets and costumes, and a basketball court—and I'm probably leaving something out. Oh, yes—prints and video. Hancock explores this panoply of materials and approaches to tell compelling, often disturbing, often hilarious stories, presenting us with a private mythology populated by idiosyncratic characters who stand for the larger racial and social dramas of the present day. We encounter ongoing, sometimes interlocking sagas, ambiguous tales involving an alter ego hero, malevolent creatures, and benign shape changers, with guest appearances by Philip Guston's Klansman, presented sometimes as the enemy, sometimes (as in Guston's paintings) as a kind of alternative self-portrait. We are engaged by the physical richness and variety of Hancock's command of mediums and methods and by his gorgeous, complex inflections of line and surface, yet at the same time we realize that this lavish presentation of formal possibilities encapsulates potent metaphors for good and evil and, by extension, for the strife and inequities of present-day America. Hancock invented his alter ego, the somewhat chubby but muscular Torpedo Boy, when he was still a schoolboy. Today, Torpedo Boy's adventures, which Hancock describes as "talking to myself," include doing battle with evil Vegans, a tribe of child-size malefactors, visible to the rest of the world only when they form groups. Among other unpleasant characteristics, the dogmatic, aggressive Vegans (inspired, Hancock says, by some sanctimonious college housemates) can't see color. They are at war with the Mounds, an ancient race, half human, half plant, that stands for peace, tolerance, and progressive attitudes. Vegans can invade human bodies, creating an insatiable appetite for tofu in the host. The carnivorous Torpedo Boy, who can see color, has been fighting Vegans for some time, siding with the peace-loving Mounds. The struggle was brought to vivid, three-dimensional life in Hancock's sets and costumes for Cult of Color: Call to Color, an ambitious production of Ballet Austin. Recently, in an expansion of what Hancock calls "a one liner: 'What if Torpedo Boy met Guston's Klansman?'" the artist's alter ego has been confronting hooded [End Page 122] figures. For that, he wears a yellow football uniform and helmet; vicious blades projecting from his feet are useful for stomping. In the paintings, elusive texts, some more visible than others, nudge our associations toward the vicissitudes of the present, but the messages are almost always open to multiple interpretations. Are the figures in a deceptively straightforward painting exchanging a weapon? Are we dealing with an allusion to commodification and commerce? Or is it something more playful? Or all the above? Hancock is fond of wordplay, and we occasionally discover anagrams and puns. On one level, Hancock's work can be read as powerful, bitterly funny, and visually delectable social commentary. Sometimes that commentary dominates; sometimes the visually delectable part does. There's usually an autobiographical element, although we don't need to know it to savor the work. Hancock's ability to orchestrate line, pattern, and texture—including ready-made materials with vernacular associations—makes us concentrate on the physical fact of his drawings and paintings, while his imagery compels our attention and provokes a wealth of associations. His oblique, often disquieting narratives engage us whether or not we know their origins, while his recent confrontational orchestrations of seemingly abstract elements demand close reading to yield their full but still open-ended complexity. Yet it's enriching to learn that Hancock invented Torpedo Boy when he was a child; a terrific drawing...